1. Field
The present invention relates generally to a graphical user interface in a system and, more specifically, to the use of aerial perspective in a graphical user interface.
2. Description
In a typical windowing environment of a graphical user interface (GUI), when a dialog box or child window is opened from a parent window of a program, such as an application program, one visual cue given to the user that the new child window in the GUI has the current primary focus (e. g., is xe2x80x9cactivexe2x80x9d) is that the new child window is in the foreground of the display and the parent window is in the background. That is, the child window typically obscures or occludes at least a portion of the parent window. Unfortunately, the size of the child window may be small relative to the size of the parent window, making the child window appear less obvious to the user. Furthermore, depending on the windowing environment, the foreground/background relationship of the windows may not be clear, even though the child window may partially occlude the parent window. Typically, the only other explicit visual or design cue provided by the GUI of an operating system (OS) (such as any of the versions of the Windows(trademark) OS available from Microsoft Corporation, for example) that the parent window is inactive and the child window is active is that the title bar of the inactive window is changed to exhibit a color indicating that it is now inactive.
Additionally, when using a GUI, a user often has many windows open at a time on a display, with some of the windows perhaps even overlapping. Because the only design cue regarding the inactive/active status of a window is the color of the title bar, the problem of recognition of the active window by the user is made even more difficult in a crowded windowing environment having many open windows. The user, especially a novice user, may become confused as to which of the many windows is the active window to which attention should currently be focused.
Hence, there is a need in the user interface art to make systems easier to use by overcoming the confusion caused by inadequate design cues relating to active and inactive windows.
An embodiment of the present invention is a method of representing display objects in a graphical user interface. The method includes modifying appearance characteristics of a first display object, the first display object transitioning from an active to an inactive state, to make the first display object appear farther from a user than at least one other display object. The method further includes modifying appearance characteristics of a second display object, the second display object transitioning from the inactive state to the active state, to make the second display object appear closer to the user than at least the first display object.